Broken
by Inomuiro
Summary: Three children are falling apart, but when Kankuro gets injured while training with Karasu,both his sibs try to get close to him. But maybe they're just going to hurt themselves more... or do they? Short fic, Sand sibs emo.


Naruto (c) Kishimoto

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**Broken**

Kankuro lies over the bed in the dark room, pretending he's asleep.

"Hey, little brother. I know you're awake."

The nine-years old kid does not open his eyes. He tries breathing heavier. If he does not react maybe she'll just leave him alone.

"You're fooling no one. C'mon…!"

Temari's eyes narrow. She hates being ignored. For a moment she thinks about throwing him out of the bed, but then her gaze rests over his bandaged hands. Four fingers of the right and two of the left are hold still with sticks. She sighs.

"You got only your hands hurt, not your feet. Why don't you come out of here? You can't…"

"Only my hands!" Kankuro's eyes fly open, burning, and he jumps up to a sitting position, his wish to be left alone brooding swept away by anger.

"Only my hands! They're the most important thing I have, I can't do anything if I can't use them! I can't even make him move, I can't fix him!" The boy gestures with a rigid limb towards the corner of the room where Karasu is sitten, his head hanging down. Temari twitches as she follows his gesture. That thing is much taller than her little brother, she's always found unpleasant seeing him going around the palace with it, guided by his fingers. Since his control is still far from that of a master puppetteer, the damn thing always moves uncongruosly, with sudden turns of its scattered limbs and clattering its jawbone (the last thing is probably done purposedly, since she has been so stupid to let slip out that she found the sound unnerving…).

"I wish I had my legs hurt… even got them not moving forever! It would be better than… ow!"

He reaches to rub with his palm his backhead, where Temari's just hit him.

"Do not say that, you stupid brat!" she says, angrily. "They said you'll get your fingers back in a few days, and then you can do anything you want, go play with your damn friend for all the time you want, I don't care!" Temari knows perfectly well that what Kankuro does is not playing. The puppets are a powerful weapon, their manipulation an ancient art of Suna, and Kankuro is the first child judged able enough to be taught in it, in such a long time. He has been so happy of it, of getting finally some attention on his own, while everybody always seems being focused only on their brother, and he's tried very hard to learn all he could all the fastest. He'd been given an old puppet, built by the the greatest puppetteer ever lived, and he started to actually living together with it. He even talked to it!

One day, after he had been hardly rebuked by their father, Temari had gone looking for him and found him into a far room of the palace, crying. He was making Karasu hold him and clinged to that thing like for life's sake. Temari had been so scared by that. When they were both younger, sometimes Kankuro went to her when he cried. She mocked him for being such a cry-baby, she almost never cried at all, and surely she did not go looking for other people to be comforted. But she held him, and tried finding ways to cheer him up, cause she loved her little brother.

Now that thing has taken him away from her, and she hates it for that.

She walks over the puppet and stares. Secretely, she imagines to walk on it, crushing it to pieces with her feet, smiling as she does it. Shattering that ugly grin, breaking those wooden eyes. She'll never do anything like that, obviously, She does not even want to think about what could be Kankuro's reaction. And anyway, she realizes with surprise as she looks at it closer, the puppet is already damaged bad enough by itself. Its head is hanging lower than usual, and at a strange angle, and the black vest is shredded. What she can see of its mechanism through the holes doesn't seem in good conditions, even if she does not know, and does not want to know, much about its functioning.

She glances at Kankuro, who's recoiling over the bed.

"What's happened to Karasu?"

The boy shakes his head. "I need to fix him. I would, if only I had not these stupid things" he looks at the sticks.

"You must not move them, or they'll never heal, you stupid…" says Temari half-heartedly, as she checks the puppet closer, as much as she can without touching the thing. Some junctures of its arms and legs look dishevelled. She's sure the puppet was not so bad damaged after the accident in which Kankuro broke his fingers, the boy would have immediately asked for his teacher to help him repair it.

"Kankuro… someone touched it?" But he has not moved from the room in the past three days, and the shinobis who take care of the Kazekage family knows better than trying to use the puppet.

Kankuro avoids her gaze. He lifts his left hand, and his thumb, one of the few fingers not hurt, flickers. Temari sees the thin thread of chakra, tying up to Karasu's hand. The puppet raises it, hardly, up in front of its head, almost like a try to shield itself. One moment later the thread breaks, and the arm falls down. Kankuro gasps. His face looks like he's six years old again, the kid who refused to stop holding Temari's shirt's rim.

"What's happened?" his sister asks again, as she starts to fear she knows it.

--/---/---/--

_He's into his room, right after his hands were treated, and he's feeling so stupid. Making such a dumb mistake… Now he won't be able to move Karasu for a while. He wonders how he would survive to the boredeness. Karasu looks at him from the floor, he seems to feel as bad as Kankuro does. The boy stands up and goes rammaging through his shelves. Finally he finds the scroll he was looking for and carefully takes it between both his hands. He can think about the new modifications he's planning to make on Karasu, as soon as he can handle tools. He wants to make him the strongest puppet ever. As he turns back, feeling a bit better, he freezes. The door is half-open. His little brother is peeking through the opening._

"_G-Gaara… what are you doing here?" Kankuro speaks hardly, feeling his throat suddenly dried. Gaara never goes looking for his siblings. When he goes out of his rooms, he usually just walks around the palace like a ghost, observing people who shiver and back away from his soft footsteps._

_The younger boy looks at him, then at the puppet, then back again at his brother's hands._

"_You got hurt." He says, in the cold monotone his voice has become since some years. He stares at the bandages intently._

"_Yes… I was training, I… was careless and did not controlled the chakra well enough… Karasu got hit and the blow ran back on the threads and I got my fingers broken…" _

"_You can't use him." Gaara looks again at Karasu, and pushes the door fully open, slipping into the room._

_Kankuro shakes his head. He's so scared. He doesn't even remember when exactly he started being scared of Gaara. When his curiosity towards that distant kid, with whom neither him nor Temari got ever the chance to play, or even stay together in the same room outside of the official moments in which the whole family was required, had turned first to jealousy, because of all the attention he received, and then to sheer fear._

"_You two always move together." Gaara goes on. "You are sad he can't move now, aren't you?"_

"_Yes… yes I am." Why is Gaara so interested about it? What is he thinking about?_

_Gaara looks into Kankuro's eyes, and this time his gaze got something alive, something twitching. He stretches his lips into a smile, showing his teeths. _

"_I can move him for you."_

_And the sand comes over, from all around. It shapes into thin tentacles, creeping under Karasu, up along his wooden limbs. Next moment the puppet is yanked up, straddled by the tentacles holding him. Gaara's look is concentrated. Kankuro's is horrified._

"_No…" he breathes._

_The sand pulls one arm up, in the wrong direction, and the junction creaks, resisting the torsion. Gaara's eyes narrow, not understanding what's not working, and pulls harder. There's the sharp sound of breaking._

"_NO! LEAVE HIM ALONE!" Kankuro shouts, and launch himself towards his puppet, without thinking. He's hurting him. He's hurting him, and he must stop it. The shout startles Gaara, and he lets the puppet fall to the floor in a puddle of scattered wood and cloth. Kankuro covers him with his body, shaking. With the corner of his eyes, he sees Gaara's expression change, from shock to quick growing anger. He closes his eyes and waits._

--/---/---/--

"There were voices out in the hall, Satori's and someone other's. He left, I don't know why, I was sure he'd have… he'd killed me." Kankuro trails over, looking down at his hands.

Temari swallow, realizing she's been holding her breath. She doesn't know what to say. She's scared of Gaara, as everyone else around the whole Suna. Time ago, so much time ago, now it seems, she tried, together with Kankuro, to talk to him, because it was so absurd having someone of the family kept away like that… Father said he had killed mother, but she did not believed it. It had been an accident, how could a kid murder someone, and his mother too! Then there was the day both brother and sister went so near getting killed by the sand. The guardians took Gaara away, somehow, they said he was very unstable in that moment, because of the thing he had inside. Temari had wanted to scream, to ask them WHY, why they had to do something so horrible, put a thing like that into her little brother. But she could not. She could not talk. She just stayed there, not able to move a finger, with Kankuro holding on her. He had asked her the same question, later on that distant night, and again she had not been able to say a word. Some days later, Gaara had been back in the palace. He did not talk, did not give a sign he realized he almost killed his siblings.

"This is why you are afraid to leave the room? You think he'll try kill you again?"

"No… he could do that anyway… I just… I don't…" He sniffles, trying not to cry. He hates how he cries so often, how it shows he's the weakest of all them. He hates doing that in front of Temari.

"He won't do that. He's never tried to do that again, you know it, even when he gets mad. We are his family, I'm sure this is something…"

Kankuro glances at her, and now there's spite spite mingled with unshed tears.

"That does not stop father from trying to kill him. It's… why they had to do it? It's so crazy…"

They both quieted, at the definitive reminder of what kind of crazy, absurd life they live. Yes, if that is what family means…

Finally Temari bends over, and takes the broken puppet into her arms. She can't but make a face as she lifts it, with utter care, afraid harsh movement will make some other piece fall. She'll NEVER like it, no matter what. She drafts the heavy puppet to her brother's bed, and puts it over it. Kankuro looks at her wordlessly.

"Here." She says. "Listen, get some more rest, and then you'll come with me. I need someone pointing out my mistakes when I try katas, sometimes I can't notice I'm doing wrong, and that's something you can do without hands. You need some sunlight before turning into a bat, little brother."

Kankuro nods, as he brushes Karasu's hair.

"You know, I… I don't hate him. I don't _want_ to be afraid of him, I did not want to shout at him. I just… at his place I know I'd had already killed myself or definitely killed everybody else in this place. And still I can't be…"

"I know it." Temari says, and then she quickly bends and kiss him on his forehead, before he gets the time to back away. That gets her a disgusted exclamation, alive enough to make her feel things were going to get a bit better, sooner or later.

She moves to the door, opening it with a last mocking remark. She turns to go out of the room, but not quick enough to catch the shadow disappearing behind a far corner.

FIN


End file.
